Wednesday, May 21, 2008

ZK Roadmap 2008

First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for your continuous enthusiasm about ZK. Without your support, ZK won't be able to accomplish the wonderful achievements ever. Only within two years, ZK has accumulated over half a million downloads. The list of customers, ranging from small to Fortune 500 companies, is growing fast. The deployment of ZK is moving from pioneer projects to the de facto standard for rich Internet applications in many companies.

The most important of all is that tens of thousands developers are enjoying the power of "Simply Rich." Developing a rich Internet application can be and shall be easier than developing a desktop application. ZK is not yet another Ajax framework. Rather, a new generation of Web application development.

It is our driving force to carry ZK to a higher level. Here I'd like to share the new development of ZK in 2008 with you. Your feedback is highly appreciated.

这是我们的力量使得ZK得以走得更远。在这里我给大家分享一下ZK在2008年新的开发计划。深切期待您的反馈。

Simple

简单

Year 2007 was a busy year for us to deliver new concepts to simplify the Ajax application development, such as fulfill on demand, event forwarding and MVC by composer. In 2008, we will emphasize more on providing more documents and better integration with the development tools.

Documentation

文档

The long-awaiting Style Reference Guide and Component Development Guide will be published in 2008. Style Reference Guide will demostrate how to customize the look and feel for each component with pure CSS. Component Development Guide will describe how to implement a component either from scratch or by wrapping a third-party widget.

等待已久的风格参考指南和组件开发指南将会在2008年发布。风格参考指南将会示范如何通过纯粹的CSS为每个组件客户化其外观（Look and feel）。组件开发指南将会描述从零开始、或者从封装第三方widget的方式实现一个组件。

In addition, we will keep exploring new concepts and new ways to apply features through small talks. For example, many of application-specific features can be done by use of annotations, such as multilingual and Web service integration.

In 2008, we are going to take a step further. First, we will provide an Eclipse plugin to simplify the creation of ZK applications and ZUML files, and to provide better integration with Zero Kode. Many of them shall be done with no more than a few mouse clicks.

Rich

丰富

ZK is one of the most complete frameworks delivering versatile rich user experiences. But, we don't stop, and instead, we will keep providing more components and more richness, The most notables are ZK Spreadsheet, more third-party components, and 508 compliance.

ZK Spreadsheet

ZK电子表格

ZK Spreadsheet is one of the most important development in 2008. Unlike Microsoft Excel, it is Web-based. Unlike Google Spreadsheets, it has a neat and powerful Java API that is 100% controllable and customizable. You can embed any number of ZK spreadsheets into your Web page(s). Best of all, it is open source.

In 2008, we will keep delivering updates to these extensions, and explore the best practice to work with them. In addition, we will keep on enabling your ZK applications to reach as many and various clients as possible.

Flash, AIR and Android

Like ZK Mobile, we will keep pushing your ZK applications to reach as many and versatile clients as possible, such as Flash player, AIR and Android. In addition, we'd like to explore the possibility of using, say, Flash CS3 to design a ZK page. It is interesting to see the chemistry that can be achieved by combining the simplicity of ZK's server-centric architecture with the versatile functionality of rich clients.

In 2008, we'd like to explore the best practice to use ZK with the scripting languages -- particularly, how to boost the productivity of developing a rich Internet application with a dynamic programming language.

在2008年，我们希望能探索出一些ZK与脚本语言一起使用的最佳实践 -- 特别是，如何采用一种动态编程语言一起，提升开发RIA的生产力。

Community

社区

An open-source community is all about collaboration. ZK started with a superior architecture that is easy to extend, and with a friendly community who loves to share. We saw a lot of collaboration among the ZK community, such as contributing codes, translating messages, submitting articles, suggesting features, reporting bugs, and answering questions in 2007. In 2008, we will enhance the website to encourage collaboration further. For example, the forum will be renewed with ZK Forum.

Wish you a prosperous 2008 and enjoy "Simply Rich" of ZK!祝愿你又一个顺利的2008，同时能够尽兴于Zk的“Simple Rick”中。

Yours Sincerely,顺颂商祺！

Tom M. Yeh Founder, ZKZK创始人

Disclaimer: This roadmap is for information only and represents current view of ZK product direction. None of the information should be interpreted as a commitment on the part of Potix Corporation. POTIX MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.